Harry Pregerson, Judge Guided by Conscience, Dies at 94

Harry Pregerson, who as a judge on California’s famously liberal Ninth Circuit federal court for a half-century placed his personal scruples over what he discounted as abstract legalities, died on Saturday at his home in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 94.

His death was confirmed by a court spokesman, David J. Madden.

Judge Pregerson, who grew up in diverse East Los Angeles, wielded formidable influence not only in interpreting the law but also by using his bully pulpit on the bench and functioning, through edicts and consent decrees, as a social engineer.

He may be the only federal judge to have halted construction of an interstate expressway because it would have disproportionately uprooted poor people and later to be saluted for his decision.

He demanded that the entire project, the Century Freeway, be reconceived to provide housing, jobs and other services to mitigate its impact on neighborhood residents. Those programs accounted for nearly half of the project’s $2.2 billion budget.

Remarkably, when the highway opened in 1993, an interchange was named for Judge Pregerson in recognition of his having protected the residents of South-Central Los Angeles.

Regardless of whether he would be overruled by the United States Supreme Court — which the Ninth Circuit, which includes seven western states, was, inordinately — Judge Pregerson stuck to his guns. His resolve should have come as no surprise.

“If a decision in a particular case was required by case law or statute,” Senator Alan Simpson, a Wyoming Republican, asked at the judge’s confirmation hearing for the appeals court in 1979, “and yet that offended your own conscience, what might you do in that situation?”

Judge Pregerson, a Marines veteran, replied unflinchingly.

“I would try and find a way to follow my conscience and do what I perceived to be right and just,” he said.

At another point he said: “My conscience is a product of the Ten Commandments, the Bill of Rights, the Boy Scout Oath and the Marine Corps Hymn. If I had to follow my conscience or the law, I would follow my conscience.”

His judicial activism provoked disparate responses.

“He was the most progressive judge I’ve ever encountered in my career, and one of the most successful social engineering judges in the country,” Peter Neufeld, a founder of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit group that seeks to exonerate the wrongly convicted, said in a telephone interview.

Writing in the conservative Weekly Standard in 2003, the commentator and radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt cited Judge Pregerson’s “candor” and “courage,” but suggested, as the headline put it, that he ruled “with his heart instead of his head.”

Judge Pregerson freely defied legislative intent and judicial precedent if he believed he was right.

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Judge Pregerson, left, swearing in James Hahn as Mayor of Los Angeles in 2001.CreditNick Ut/Associated Press

When a World War II veteran from the Philippines was denied citizenship because he had missed an unambiguous naturalization deadline, Judge Pregerson, dissenting in a 1988 decision against the veteran, wrote, “The conscience of our nation should tell us that Dr. Bernardo Ortega deserves better treatment from a government he valiantly served in time of war.”

Hoisting the Supreme Court on its own equal-protection petard, he joined with two other judges in 2003 in appropriating its majority opinion in the 2000 Bush v. Gore election case as a means to block a vote to recall Gov. Gray Davis of California.

The judges found that some counties were voting with punch cards, similar to those that had produced uncountable “hanging chads” in the 2000 vote in Florida, a factor that had figured in the Supreme Court’s decision to halt a vote recount there, insuring George W. Bush the presidency. (His decision was overruled.)

Judge Pregerson intervened to halt executions, insisting that the process under which capital punishment was imposed was inherently unfair. He balked at imposing California’s three-strikes sentencing law when the third offense, making imprisonment mandatory, was relatively minor.

“What distinguished him as a jurist was his seeing law not as abstract principles, but in terms of what it meant in people’s lives,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an email.

Harry Pregerson was born on Oct. 23, 1923, in Los Angeles, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, Abraham, was a World War I veteran and a postal worker. His mother was the former Bessie Roobalsky.

Harry enlisted in the Marines and was discharged as a first lieutenant after being seriously wounded in both legs during the Battle of Okinawa in World War II. He resumed his education after the war and graduated in 1947 from the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned his law degree at Berkeley.

He served on the Municipal Court and the Superior Court in Los Angeles before President Lyndon B. Johnson named him to the federal bench for California’s Central District in 1967. He was appointed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.

He is survived by his wife, the former Bernardine Chapkis; his daughter, Dr. Katie Rodan, a dermatologist; his son, Dean, a senior federal judge in California’s Central District; his brother, Jim; his sister, Diane Glazer; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Judge Pregerson pursued the same social agenda off the bench as on. He established homeless shelters and job training programs in Los Angeles, and he made helping veterans a priority.

He remained an active judge and accepted senior status, with a lighter caseload, only after turning 92. In his last years, he was so hobbled by the effects of his war wounds that he needed ski poles to walk.

Finally, his son told The Los Angeles Times, a few nights before he died, Judge Pregerson expressed a single regret to his wife.

“The hard thing,” he was quoted as saying, “is that I don’t have strength anymore to help people.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B14 of the New York edition with the headline: Harry Pregerson, 94, a Judge Guided by Conscience. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe